Over the years, there have been many problems with the adoption of sending video messages instead of email. Video files sent by email may be large, and it is difficult for a sender to know whether a receiving email application or system will allow or reject the file. The uploading and subsequent downloading of video files prior to viewing them may also impose time costs, and may burden email systems that place a cap on email bandwidth or storage. Video messages that include personal content may also be forwarded to recipients not intended by the original sender to view the private nature of the message. Moreover, a user that stores a large amount of email messages may wish to perform a content-based search of those messages to find a message of interest, a task that may not be possible with video messages.